"The Self-Destructive Habits of Good Companies and How to Break Them" by Jagdish N. Seth

This book was interesting with some anecdotes on companies such as the founding of Avon, the history of its name, and how demographics led it to venture overseas.   There is a very interesting piece on how Enterprise snuck up on Avis and Hertz while these two long-time rivals just focused on each other.  The author described this as "competitive myopia".

Below is a link that describes this book:
http://www.leadershipnow.com/leadershop/9780131791138.html

Beyond the interesting anecdotes, I found that the author went down some related yet distracting trails such as US corporate tax history and asset accounting.  Though fascinating, I did not find that these side trail discussions were very helpful.  Rather, I had a difficult time correlating the companies covered and how they correlated to the destructive habit the author was describing.

Finally, I felt as if the author did not spend enough time on instructing how to break these habits. 


It was a 9-hour audio book that I do not recommend.